Marker evokes memories of when black gold reigned

John Hall, 91, came from Oklahoma to the "boom town" of Griffin in 1938.

DENNY SIMMONS / Courier & Press

GRIFFIN, Ind. - The discovery of oil on Dec. 14, 1938, was like an early Christmas present for the tiny Posey County town of Griffin, barely recovered from a catastrophic tornado and flooding a dozen years earlier.

It was well past dark, 8:20 p.m. to be exact, when workers struck a gusher of black gold. Tamed with a proper rig, the well would go on to produce an estimated 1,000 barrels of oil a day and trigger an oil boom in Griffin and the Tri-State that to a lesser extent continues today.

Even now, passing cars on Interstate 64 can see the pump jack of an oil well working just a few yards from the highway. More oil wells can be seen spread out in the fields east of Main Street.

Almost overnight, Griffin and nearby New Harmony, in the county's northwest corner near the Wabash River, became the kind of boom towns most people associate with the California Gold Rush.

Word soon spread and people came from much farther than the Tri-State to work in the area. Some moved on as the oil business spread farther out in Indiana but others like John and Geneva Hall stayed on.

"I came here in March 1938 from Oklahoma City. It was a place to work. There wasn't any work in Oklahoma," said John Hall, who turned 91 last week.

He heard about it from his brother and came to check it out, finding work tearing down and moving the very first oil rig in the area and setting it up at a new well. Soon he returned to Oklahoma to convince Geneva to marry him and move to Griffin. "It was a boom town. People were everywhere," she recalled. "You couldn't find a place to live. We had to stay in an apartment in Princeton."

Homeowners rented single rooms to whole families. Men stayed in tents, barns and chicken coops. Local women earned money doing their laundry. Luck prevailed for the Halls, however, and they soon found a place to stay in New Harmony.

"We got a little house. We were lucky it wasn't a room," she said.

John Hall worked the oil fields until he was 76 and the couple built a life for themselves.

"It was an exciting era. He was a hard worker, I tell you," his wife said.

Long after the price of oil had dropped again and the jobs and stores and people had thinned out again, the Halls stayed on.

"It was dry in Oklahoma. It was wet here. You think that didn't go over well?" said John Hall, speaking about the Tri-State's lusher climate and economy.

Freida Orth was just 4 years old when her parents, Don and Eva Strickland, loaded up their Model A Ford and brought the family to Griffin from Oklahoma. The family lived at several locations in Illinois before they finally became Hoosiers.

"Things were not easy at all. Things were hard," she recalled. But it was steady work at a time when good work wasn't easy to find and the family persevered.

When Orth found out that an Indiana state historical marker would commemorate the Griffin oil boom, it nearly brought tears to her eyes.

The marker was unveiled during a public ceremony Saturday afternoon at the corner of Main and First streets following the dedication of a veterans' memorial.

Although it might not seem dramatic, the discovery of oil in Griffin was one of those transforming events that shaped the area's history, said New Harmony resident Tom Straw, who grew up in Griffin. Straw did the research and made the application to the Indiana Historical Bureau that led to the marker.

"It (the oil boom) had a controlling effect on everybody that came near it," he said Saturday.

In Straw's case, his work in the Griffin oil field as a teenager led him to a roughneck's job on drilling rigs after high school. That, in turn, inspired him to go to college after a stint in the Air Force and become a geologist. After working in the oil business and then as a college geology professor, Straw and his wife moved back to Posey County when he retired in 1995.

Today, mega-industries such as GE Plastics, Toyota, Whirlpool and Alcoa provide many of the jobs that keep the Evansville region's economy humming, but it wasn't always that way.

"Before the factories came in, agriculture and the oil fields were the main source of jobs for the Tri-State," said Don Parker, who has worked in both farming and oil since 1956. "(Oil) was the biggest employer up to about 1970."

The Griffin Oil Field - covering about 25 square miles in Posey and Gibson counties - continues to produce oil. Through 2003, it had produced more than 84 million barrels. Straw said the area is expected to produce about 250,000 barrels this year.